Matrox makes its
come back by releasing the new G450 series of board. This card uses in
fact a streamlined version of the successful Matrox G400 chip. Let's say
things clearly: this new Matrox Millennium G450 board isn't designed for
hard core gamers. Indeed Matrox now targets the Office and Small Business
market and as a matter of fact the G450 3D features can't rival with the
ones of GeForce 2 Ultra (see
our test) or 3DFX Voodoo 5500. However the G450 comes with all the 3D
features that made the success of its predecessor the G400 Max and
surpasses it with its new enhanced DualHead features.

Features List

AGP 1X, 2X, 4X

Support for OpenGL and DirectX

256-bit DualBus

DualHead Display

Vibrant Color Quality˛ rendering

Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping

UltraSharp DAC

Integrated TV encoder

High-quality DVD playback

Setup

Installing this
new card is a breeze and takes only a few minutes. The longest thing is to
find how to open your PC box! You must have an AGP slot to connect it.
Obviously the card is fully compliant with AGP 4x but can also works on
AGP 2x ports. Once you’ve replaced the old video card by this new one, you
can remount your PC box and start it. Windows will detect the new card and
you’ll be prompted to install the drivers.

What’s
new?

Compared to the
G400 Max card the
Matrox Millennium G450 offers the following improvements:

64 bits DDR SDRam of 32Mo clocked at 200Mhz

G450 processor clocked at 125MHz

G450 processor engraved at 0.18µ

360MHz RAMDAC

Matrox has also
built in the core processor a secondary 250MHz RAMDAC that is in charge of
managing the second screen with a maximum resolution up to 1600 * 1200 pixels
(on the G400 the resolution was only 1280 * 1024). If we look to the refresh
rates there are no differences compared to the G450 except in high resolution
(1920*1440 & 2048*1536) where the refresh rate are higher providing a better
image quality.

2D/3D
Resolutions and Color

Colors

16
MB

256

2048
x 1536

65 K

2048
x 1536

16.8
M

2048
x 1536

Maximum
Refresh Rates

Refresh
Rates

Vertical
(Hz)

Horizontal
(KHz)

2048
x 1536

85

110

1920
x 1440

85

115

1880
x 1440

90

120

1600
x 1200

100

130

1280
x 1024

120

130

1152
x 864

140

130

1024
x 768

160

130

800
x 600

200

130

640
x 480

200

130

First
Look

The Millennium
G450 is a small
sized 3D graphic card. This is surely due to the fact Matrox tries to
reduce costs
to lower the TCO. The G450 processor is protected by an heatsink with no
fan,
since it doesn't heat too much it's sufficient. The
heatsink is linked to the card with an orange cable to remove noises that can
appear on analogical outputs. The total DDRSDRAM of 32MB is composed of 4 chips
of 8MB.